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Friday, December 30, 2011

I use my knuckles as a weapon

The current list of Monk useable weapons was announced to us with everything else at Blizzcon. On the Monk page over at Blizzard's official site they list:

Fist Weapons

One-Handed Axes

One-Handed Maces

One-Handed Swords

Polearms

Staves

Sharing leather gear with druids and rogues points our primary stats to Agility for DPS/Tanking and Int for Healing. For a few of these categories that hopefully means more itemization. Considering we've only seen one Agi Fist Off-hand (Arlokk's Claws) of epic quality in Cataclysm (for PvE) it's not a difficult task to beat that record. As long as they don't make another horrible abomination set that was the Claws of Torment/Agony where one is agi and one is str but they make a set bonus. Not sure where someone thought that was a good idea.

Now the impact weapons are going to play on Monks is something I'm going to call into question. Obviously for melee classes a weapon upgrade can be a big deal, but is it as big of a deal if you don't use auto attacks? What about the monk abilities? Are some of them going to be weapon damage based? The current plan is that the weapons only come out on the big finishing moves, but that doesn't mean regular attacks will not be based on weapon damage.

So there's a few questions to be looking into when we finally get a preview of monk attacks. If they're based on weapon damage or just AP. How they balance the skills around 1h and 2h, if they choose to push tanks towards 2h and DPS towards 1h or allow both to work just fine.

Right now the picture I'm getting from it is that DPS monks will be going after weapons like the Enhancement Shamans. Two big slow weapons for highest damage possible being put into the skills. This has the side benefit of making slow agi off hand weapons useful for another class and we'll see more of them itemized. What happens to the way Monk skills and weapons interact is going to play a big part in the upcoming beta.